The Palestine Action judicial review has been slammed for what appear to be dodgy doings in changing the judges Right, so you can always tell when the British state is nervous, because it stops pretending it isn’t. And that’s exactly what’s happened with the Palestine Action judicial review. A judge who granted permission for the case has been removed from it. No reason, no explanation, just gone. And in his place the judiciary has quietly installed a panel that reads like the Home Office’s wish-list: the government’s former national-security attack dog, the judge who has already shielded the UK–Israel arms pipeline, and the senior public-law judge whose own family sits deep inside the financial networks tied to the very companies Palestine Action has been exposing. And the Starmer government thinks people won’t notice. Well they’re going to after this rant. Get comfy because this is a long one, but you won’t hear half of this anywhere else, but more people need to, because this is one h*ll of a stitch up. Right, so the situation with the Palestine Action judicial review is one of those moments where you can feel the system blinking. You can feel it shifting its weight, you can feel it deciding that the truth of what has happened cannot be allowed to stand on its own terms, and you can feel the Starmer government settling into the machinery with the kind of confidence only a government has when it believes the institutions will bend for it, not against it. You start with a simple fact: a High Court judge, Mr Justice Chamberlain, granted permission for the most significant challenge to the UK’s t*rrorism powers in years, and days before the hearing, he gets removed without explanation. No reason, no notice, no transparency. A judge removed at the last minute from a case that threatens two thousand arrests, the credibility of the Home Office itself, the state’s alignment with Israeli defence interests, and the political authority of the Starmer government which has been presenting its proscription as a clean, lawful act. And you don’t need to be an expert in judicial process to recognise that this isn’t normal. You just need to know how British institutions behave when they’re under pressure, because they behave like this: silently, abruptly, and in a way that reveals more about the pressures they are under than they ever intended to show.